Posts Tagged With: Music

I have little time for piracy but I have even less time for the music industry. The former because I am not a spoilt man child who expects to have something for nothing, the latter because I wish to give them something and they often provide me with nothing.

There is a particular song I’ve always adored. Indeed a specific version of it, actually. Despite being a metal fan, I do have a weakness for a girl and an acoustic guitar, so my music collection features Tori Amos, Sophie B Hawkins and others. In 1995, I got myself a copy of Amanda Marshalls debut album, and it is pretty good. I had bought the first single “Let It Rain” on cassette and the B-side (kids, ask your parents) was a live version of another album track called “Last Exit To Eden”. An ode to the uncertainty of walking away, it features one of my favourite opening verses ever.

The walls are thin here in this motel room
Some fool is raging overhead
He’s preaching the Gospel
According to
Johnnie Walker Red

Which I think is a simply wonderful line.

The album track is good, but the B-side is live, in Montreal I think and is just Marshall and an acoustic guitar. And given that Amanda Marshall has a supremely powerful,earthy voice, it becomes a soulful, bluesy, pain filled number. I adore it. If I could sing, I’ve often thought about learning the guitar just to play it.

And yet, I can’t buy this track on MP3. Hell, I can’t even find it. I have a second hand recording from the original cassette. The closest I have is this YouTube video.

The guitar isn’t the same and there is a backing band. The soul is still there but it gnaws at me that this other version, my perfect version, is out there.

This week, several prominent websites blacked themselves out in protest at SOPA/PIPA – two laws currently being drafted to prevent online piracy. However, because the entertainment industry has bought and paid for the US political system (to be fair, they are not the only owners and the UK Parliament is almost as bad) the laws are so broadly drafted as to shut down the entirety of WordPress because I happened to have linked to that YouTube video above.

Yet, as previously stated, I wish to purchase the song and pay real money for it. I can’t. The closest I can get is the video above, which means I put everyone with a WordPress blog in jeopardy. Punishment of innocent people for being unable to purchase a legal item. It isn’t just a stupid situation, it is an insane one.

And that is before we consider that many of the major participants in the music industry are law breakers, from sampling, copying, drug taking, gang warfare, prostitution, exploitation, fraud, assault and battery and various other shenanigans that come with “hell raising rock stars”, “record producers” and “music executives”.

Of course, a piece of paper is the worst padlock ever invented, so absolutely nothing will change. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again – piracy is not killing the music industry, the music industry is killing the music industry. It chokes off its own air supply, forces product people don’t want onto them and then wonders why the consumer goes off to the equivalent of a back street hustler in order to get the product they want. Black markets exist because they supply things to people that they want but can’t get.

Anyway, we all know the arguments. Point is, here is a great song. It isn’t the best version, but unless I can figure out just how to get hold of that in this day and age, then it is the best I can do.

I don’t normally write much about the X-Factor and all that, save the odd sneering comment from the sidelines. The world seems to divide into several categories, those dumb enough to watch it and vote, those dumb enough to watch it and those watching it “ironically” in order to post sarcastic comments online about it.

Anyway, my ire was stoked when I heard that one of the previous winners Leona Lewis had covered “Hurt”.

The reason this sticks in my craw so much is that “Hurt” is a song absolutely loaded with meaning. The Nine Inch Nails original is the climax of their classic Downward Spiral album, the theme of which is a man heading into despair, with each song building uncomfortably to the next before we reach his own suicide in “Hurt”.

“I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel.”

The song was famously covered by Johnny Cash, who imbued it with his own meaning. It was Cashs final song, and the video is utterly stunning, as it reviews his own life through clips and becomes a reflection on Cash and his place in history.

And then it gets covered by Leona fucking Lewis.

Don’t get me wrong, in the pantheon of X-Factor winners Lewis is probably the most talented. Which is like saying a sprained wrist is better than a broken leg, but she does have the voice to carry off what she has done, which is build a career as a sort of Mariah Carey-lite. Unfortunately, she has the charisma of a broken bottle combined with the stunning ability to suck all the passion out of whatever song she has been directed to warble. The girl could suck the life out of Agadoo.

If that wasn’t bad enough, and on a much more personal note, she has also covered “Iris” by Goo Goo Dolls. Now this one means something, specifically to me, because it was our wedding song. Without getting into it too much, the lyrics meant something to me and my better half. If one attempted to measure the irony of a fucking X-Factor winner singing “I don’t want the world to see me”, the resulting number would be so huge it would need Professor Brian Cox standing on a mountain somewhere and going “that’s amaaaaazing“.

In addition to Lewis’ attempt, “Iris” has also been covered by Avril Lavigne and Ronan Keating. What the hell did the Goo Goo Dolls do to deserve that parade of mediocrity?

I accept that manufactured pop music has to exist. It always has, and it always will – hell, the Beatles were a boy band. Part of me actually admires the ruthlessness of the X-Factor, systematically stripping the business of music production down to the bare minimum of effort for the maximum profit. They have got so good at it, that next year the winners single will be the same song no matter who actually wins the competition, exactly the same song whether it is won by the bloke, the girl or the band – they will just change the JPG for the download in iTunes and it will still be the Christmas Number One.

But I’ll only accept that if it leaves proper, good music alone. Music from the heart, music by people who understand things like emotion and meaning. Something that is interesting. If it were comedy, then I’m happy to have Stewart Lee and Gary Delaney and Die Clatterschenkenfietermaus, and you can have the future of comedy, which is Michael McIntyre and Peter Kay, live from the O2, stamping on a human face forever.

“I’m staaaaamping. Everybody in. Everybody in. I’m staaaaamping.”

Anyway, instead of staying in its own niche, carefully prepackaged and demographically tested to within an inch of its life, X-Factor (or rather the true evil behind it all, which is Syco) get reaching over to “my” side of the divide and nicking songs. Last years winner, Alexandra Burke, did a cover of “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen. A song so full of depth and meaning, that it was best sung by someone the wrong side of 50, who was drunk and going through the end of their third marriage. (For added authenticity, one of those marriages must have ended because the spouse died too young.) Jeff Buckley did perhaps the definitive cover of the song and he is allowed to get away with it through creative use of the premature death clause.

So thanks to Syco, it becomes a song sung by a former shelf-stacker barely out of her teens. Who later said “It just didn’t do anything for me.”

I know I am standing on the beach, raging impotently at the approaching tidal wave, but some things are important. I’ll leave manufactured karaoke singers alone if they stop stealing the things that are important to me and cheapening them. I wouldn’t mind but not a single person involved in the production of “Hurt” has the slightest possible clue about the ability of music to generate passion, emotion or meaning. If they did, they wouldn’t actually go ahead with it. A legion of singers, producers, auto-tune engineers and a record company that hasn’t the faintest idea about what makes music so vitally important in the first place.

And they are encroaching on those who do care. I’m not asking for much, just to have my little space, free from blandification and turning into commercial product. I just want it to remain special, but they have to try and take that from me as well, my one last inch.